Novel Quotes
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There is no 'right' way to begin a novel, but for me, plot has to wait. The character comes first.
Susan Isaacs
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And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.
Terence McKenna
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You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year
Ray Bradbury
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The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt. Precisely because we keep questioning everything, especially our own premises, we are always ready to improve our knowledge. Therefore a good scientist is never ‘certain’. Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain: because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better elements of evidence, or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use, but is in fact damaging, if we value reliability.
Carlo Rovelli
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I know you sometimes think that people are like books. But our lives don’t have neat logical plots, and we don’t always say beautiful, intelligent things like the characters in a novel. That’s not the way life is.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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I mean, there are many other directors who are probably both more skilled and excited to adapt novels or work within certain genre conventions. I'd like to do that kind of work someday, but for better or worse I'm too drawn by my own material.
Todd Solondz
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Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
Chad Harbach
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Information, defined intuitively and informally, might be something like 'uncertainty's antidote.' This turns out also to be the formal definition- the amount of information comes from the amount by which something reduces uncertainty...The higher the [information] entropy, the more information there is. It turns out to be a value capable of measuring a startling array of things- from the flip of a coin to a telephone call, to a Joyce novel, to a first date, to last words, to a Turing test...Entropy suggests that we gain the most insight on a question when we take it to the friend, colleague, or mentor of whose reaction and response we're least certain. And it suggests, perhaps, reversing the equation, that if we want to gain the most insight into a person, we should ask the question of qhose answer we're least certain... Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.
Brian Christian
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The historical background is one of the easier aspects of writing a novel. Far more difficult is dreaming up the smaller, character-based scenes, scenes that rise entirely from one's own imagination.
Ethan Canin
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Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.
Ray Bradbury
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The only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel.
Edwin Muir
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I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again.
Charles Baxter
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It was a great place to write a novel about book burning, in the library basement.
Ray Bradbury
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If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
Terry Eagleton
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The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.
Eudora Welty
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Mostly the subject of the photograph, which can be anyone really, coming down the street - someone that has no idea. Heroism in photography, just like in a novel, is for everyone.
Hedi Slimane
